Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker challenged her senior technology managers to be more collaborative and coordinated in modernizing the agency’s technology infrastructure.

The result of that challenge is a four-pronged approach to the sharing of IT resources.

Steve Cooper, the Commerce Department’s chief information officer, said four working groups are examining the opportunities across technology, finance, human resources and acquisition.

“We are moving toward achieving true shared services in the sense that whatever services are identified by each of those work streams we will then, most likely — and we haven’t done this yet but this is where we are heading — by the end of quarter two or the beginning of quarter three of this fiscal year so we are making very good progress…the idea will be for those services that we agree are viable and could be delivered through a shared services set of providers,” Cooper said. “We’ll likely create an organization inside the Department of Commerce that then would be tasked with the responsibility to select those providers in each of the four functional areas, manage, put service level agreements in place, put appropriate metrics in place and ensure the successful quality delivery of those shared services.”

Cooper said the bureau level CIOs are very supportive of this effort, which, in some ways, pleasantly surprised him.